Dodgers players honor Vin Scully (video)

Vin Scully has been a Dodgers broadcaster since 1950, when the team was in Brooklyn.

The current players have grown up listening to his unique voice and many even recall the first time they heard the broadcasting legend say their name.

In the video above, the players talk to The Times about what Scully means to the team — and America.

Said Andre Ethier: “Just to hear him talk in person gives you chills every once in a while.�

Said Adam Kennedy: “Vin Scully to me is not just California baseball, but baseball in general.�

Said Matt Kemp: “He knows things about me that I don’t even know about myself.�

Dodger broadcaster Charley Steiner says that he decided to be a broadcaster after hearing Scully speak. Years later, in 2005, he got the opportunity to work alongside him.

While calling his first Dodger exhibition in Vero Beach, Fla., Steiner recalls being humbled by the way Scully described a hurricane that had hit the city and practically destroyed the baseball field.

“Vin sits down and said, ‘You know, as we look out at the palm trees off in the distance, there are some palm trees that have been knocked down and blown over, there are some palm trees of middle age that are just hanging on, and then there are some new palm trees that have just been planted.’ Then [Scully] said, ‘Isn’t that what spring training is about anyway?’

“And that’s when I got up and left.�

Scully, who is 84 years old, said he has had many incredible memories with the team, but one sticks out.

“In Brooklyn, it would be the World Series that I did in 1955 when I guess I was the first one able to say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the champions of the world.’

“It had never been said before and it was never said again.�

Said Steiner: “He’s a poet.�